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I hope to use the resources offered by the Leverhulme Trust to extend my research into information and internet geographies. This line of research asks who and where is made more powerful and given more voice by the new digital layers of place that augment the places that we live in, and who and where tends to get silenced and excluded. In previous research we have seen some of the ways in which the digital can amplify and strengthen those already in global informational cores. But, as ever more people get connected to the internet, we need to know more about what sort of change we’re seeing over time.

Going forwards, this will mean hiring a postdoc trained in some flavour of computational social science/ GIS/ big data/ quantitative geography to work with me I’ll be posting a job ad soon, but in the meantime please get in touch if you’re interested in working with me on such topics.

It really is a massive honour to have this award and to have the opportunity to use it to further some of our ongoing work. None of this would have been possible without the help of some of my brilliant and smart collaborators over the last few years. As part of the immediate group of researchers that I’ve supervised at the OII, I’ve had the luck to work closely with Sanna Ojanpera, Nicolas Friederici, Amir Anwar, Isis Hjorth, Alex Wood, Chris Foster, Stefano De Sabbata, Ralph Straumann, Heather Ford, Joe Shaw, Nisa Haji Ibrahim, Devin Gaffney, Charlotte Smart, Caludio Calvino, Ahmed Medhat, David Palfrey, Richard Farnbrough, Ning Wang, Tessy Onaji, and David Peter Simon: all of whom have played an important part in designing, carrying out, and publishing our scholarship. I also have a broader network of collaborators that I’ve also had the fortune to directly research and publish with: Matt Zook, Monica Stephens, Taylor Shelton, Ate Poorthuis, Bill Dutton, Bernie Hogan, Vili Lehdonvirta, Helena Barnard, Tim Waema, Charles Katua, Casper Andersen, Shilad Sen, Andrea Ballatore, Grant Blank, Scott Hale, Taha Yasseri, Illhem Allagui, Andrew Boulton, Jaz Choi, Han-Teng Liao, Felix Akorli, Grace Illah, Claude Bizimana, Havard Haarstad, Ralph Schroeder, Greg Taylor, Matt Wilson, Jeremy Crampton, Stann Brunn, Sean Gorman, Eduardo Lopez, Iginio Gagliardone, Emmanouil Tranos, Jim Thatcher, Dorothea Kleine, Richard Heeks, Padraig Carmody, and Rina Ghose (apologies if I have missed anyone out).

Just typing out that list of names made me realise how truly incredible the last few years have been, and what a privilege it is to get to work with so many people from such a diverse range of backgrounds. And this list doesn’t even include all of the other people who have helped along the way (such as the ever-helpful support staff at Oxford).

I didn’t intend for such a long post about this award, but once I started to write it became clear that there is no way to say ‘thanks’ for this award without thanking all of the people in my network who actually made it possible.

My talk on Internet and information geographies is now freely available on the BBC’s iPlayer (or downloadable here - if you’re in an IP-address-block that the iPlayer doesn’t like) The talk argues that the geographies of information increasingly matter because of the more prominent role of augmentations of everyday life. But that those geographies of information often amplify earlier patterns of voice, representation, and participation. I work through a series of examples in order to conclude that:

The informational divides that we’re seeing reproduced can’t simply be explained away by a lack of connectivity. Connectivity is a necessary, but, by no means, a sufficient condition. But so is a broader ecosystem of information, an educated and tech literate population, having reliable infrastructure, not excluding half of the population (in other words, women), having the internet be trusted rather than subject to surveillance by the state, and having the critical mass for local-language tools, platforms, and communities.

We’ve always had inequality, but the digital layers of places mean that the internet and the ability to produce digital and coded information might start to amplify those older imbalances of voice and power and participation. We’re not just deepening the divides between different parts of our world, we’re also creating layers of places that aren’t necessarily representative of the underlying people, processes, and contexts that exist there.

So let’s think about that the next time we use Google to find a restaurant or look something up on Wikipedia. Let’s remember that our digital tools are usually just amplifying the already most visible, the most powerful, and the most prominent things, and let’s maybe look for alternatives; different stories; different narratives; different mediators. Our world is always going to be augmented by digital information, but let’s always try to remember what it leaves out.

If you’re interested in some of my relevant/recent publications on the topic, then check out:

Most parts of our urban areas have become both digitally connected and represented by digitized information. Digital layers of geographic information (commonly referred to as “augmented reality” by computer scientists) can take myriad forms. The most visible of which are probably the digital maps that many people use to navigate through cities. Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Apple, OpenStreetMap, Baidu, and many other companies and organisations all host publicly accessible platforms that partially reflect parts of our world. These services also become the platform for an almost unimaginable amount of additional content that both reflects the materiality of cities and augments it with additional content. This additional volunteered (and emitted) geographic information is comprised of photographs, blogs, tweets, social media checkins, webcams, videos, and encyclopedia articles. These layers of digital representations are then further reproduced and repurposed in the ways that they annotate the urban environment

The ambition of this session is to interrogate the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced digital information and the code through which it is regulated. By asking what these augmented realities are, where they are and where they are not, and how they are brought into being, we can both unpack the language we use to speak about digital augmentations and explore the ways in which digital extensions of place are becoming increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies.

This session seeks two kinds of papers. First it aims to provide space for papers that explore the ways in which we should imagine, describe, critique, and even name, the digital and informational augmentations of our lives. Second, the session seeks papers that critically examine information geographies and augmented realities in specific contexts. How do informational augmentations impact on how we bring our worlds into being? What and where do they exclude? What narratives and discourses do they allow, and what do they conceal? How are they governed, regulated, and challenged?

Session 1: Practicing Data Shadows

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Visual data shadows and the difference between seeing and photographing designed landscapes

In this paper I explore the significance of gaps in the augmented ‘reality’ created by the proliferation of images online and in social media, and the extent to which visual data shadows may serve as a means of mapping or interrogating cultural values. I am particularly interested in images of designed landscape, which tend to depict urban environments in a manner that is apparently diverse but highly selective. My case is the newly renovated Grand Park in Los Angeles, where a major feature of the design and programming is the inclusion of gardens narrating a natural history of trees in LA. While these gardens present an opportunity to see the city differently—that is, as an urban forest populated by species other than palm trees, planted by a variety of cultural groups—they are relatively absent from photographs circulating via Flickr and Instagram. There are many ways of accounting for this invisibility—including the design of the landscape itself, which prioritizes views unobstructed by trees—but I focus on finding a means of making this gap in the site’s visual augmentation appear, while also theorizing its significance. What is the relationship between the circulation of images and ways of perceiving the park, and what does that in turn suggest about how visual augmentation in general works? A lack of photographs suggests that people are not attending to a given feature, but we need to think in terms of production practices and the differing contexts of circulation in order to fully unpack the significance of that inattention.

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June 16th 1904 in Dublin: Augmented Realities and James Joyce’s Ulysses(1922)

The digital layers of augmented urban geographical information hosted in Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Apple, OpenStreetMap, Baidu, are ubiquitously engaged to navigate the world’s cities and have diffused into the sphere of literature. Michael Connolly and Lee Child both employ these platforms in their crime thrillers and in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) Google Earth is used by its Dutch narrator as a navigation device to vicariously remedy home sickness while living in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Indeed, the relations between accessible geographical information and the construction of fictional narratives is a long standing one. A century ago urban information was commonly compiled in city gazetteers supplemented by foldout maps. One example is the 1904 edition of Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, employed by James Joyce while writing Ulysses (1922) to “remotely sense” from Trieste, Zurich and Paris the layout of Dublin’s streets, districts, pubs, churches, houses, and neighbourhoods, as he plotted the journeys of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dadelus and other characters as they crossed the city on the 16thof June. Frank Budgen recalled that “to see Joyce at work on the Wandering Rocks” section of the novel “was to see an engineer at work with compass and slide-rule, a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain, or more Ulyssean perhaps, a ship’s officer taking the sun, reading the log and calculating current drift and leeway” (1972, p. 123). Joyce’s literary navigation of Dublin was also informed by the visual techniques of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism. Budgen points out that “the multiplicity of technical devices is proof that Joyce subscribed to no limiting aesthetic creed and proof also that he was willing to use any available instrument that might serve his purpose”(1972, p. 198). One can only imagine if Joyce had access to the augmented realities produced today by GIS / GPS / Google Earth / Open Source platforms to navigate and explore Dublin as he creatively repurposed the city’s digital data to plot Ulysses. This paper has two aims. Firstly, it will try to counter-factually envision a scenario which finds Joyce Googling information, accessing Floating Sheep and playing with Thom’s map of Dublin in ArcGIS, as a means for us to interrogate the process of creating further fictions by gleaning information from the digital augmentation of Dublin’s urbanity. Secondly, it will juxtapose this counterfactual with a discussion of the Bloomsday app JoyceWays, and other digital platforms related to Joyce’s work, to explore within the specific context of these augmented realities which Joycean narratives and discourses they allow, which ones they conceal, and how their digital platforms frame the imagined geographical and aesthetic journeys through the periodicity and pages of Ulysses, as a reader simultaneously navigates the streets of contemporary Dublin.

The main aim of the proposed study is to investigate the lived experience of cultural difference among young Londoners (between 12-18 years) of different cultural backgrounds. Internet applications such as the video sharing platform YouTube, the social-networking site Facebook and micro-blog Twitter are taken as entry points to study the juxtaposition of differences in urban, digital representations. I will theorize and produce new empirical knowledge about how digital practices become loci of intercultural encounters. Taking a comparative approach, I focus on the networked belonging of youths from lower-class (often more multicultural) and upper-class (often more homogeneous) London boroughs on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As digital practices have become a significant part of their life, it is urgent to achieve greater insights in whether their use of Internet applications corroborates pan-European sentiments of failed multiculturalism and ethnic segregation or whether their experiences rather showcase conviviality, cross-cultural exchange and cultural hybridization. Thus far, the ways in which diverse ethnic/gender/religious identities digitally encounter, negotiate and appropriate one another across online/offline spaces have remained understudied. Innovatively bringing new media, gender and postcolonial studies into dialogue; the layered dynamics and user-generated cultural heterogeneity across Internet applications is scrutinized. The proposed study combines large-scale digital methods to study geographically tagged user-generated content, qualitative in-depth interviews with 90 youths and virtual ethnography with 30 young informants.

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Blanked Out: Data-rich and Data-blank Spaces in London as a New Frontier of Gentrification

This paper investigates the sources of disparity in digital data collection on user-generated mapping platforms in the City of London.Reexamining the phenomenon of gentrification in a digital context, the study measures participation in the augmented urban environment by analysing user-generated geographic information. Critical geography literature illustrates how inequalities become embedded in the architecture of cities. Yet, as urban environments are increasingly represented digitally, there is a growing need to account for the conditions that enable disparity in generating this urban-geographic data. Collecting metadata for businesses and points of interest, using Google Maps, Yelp and Foursquare, this paper correlates those distributions of geographic data with economic census indicators to produce overlays of digital presence and urban social processes. The reality represented by this location-enabled data is then compared with the experienced space through field surveys of three neighborhoods. This ground truthing process includes physical surveys of businesses and qualitative interviews with residents.

We propose a new analytic dimension to the urban phenomenon of gentrification—by presenting lack of inputs as blank spaces, user-generated mapping amplifies social divides in the augmented urban environment. We conclude that augmented realities are sensitive to a highly particular set of data-generators. The sensors measuring activities in these augmented realities are tuned to specific inputs, commonly aggregated by a particular socio-economic group. Through this process, those coded spaces generate a sub-group of urban residents digitally unaccounted for. In addition, this paper contributes to the research of digital spaces by devising a categorization of spatial data’s richness and blankness.

Session 2: Coding Data Shadows

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Augmented cities, socially mediated geo-platform and the geo/coding of places

This paper seeks to understand augmented cities through the interplay of processes of abstraction and geo/coded specificities.Processes of abstraction in computing are part of architecture building and code writing. It is the practice of formalizing the relationship between various entities observed and the directing of how these behave once an algorithm is set in motion. In this instance, once a social media geo-platform is in play, mobile users geo/code places within the location-based framework become determined by the program. For example, in Foursquare geo/coding occurs as individuals 'check-in’ by locating themselves in the programmed version of the ‘city’, and then geo/code it with updates, comments and multimedia. This is therefore the remediation geo-referenced information, that was exchanged by word of mouth and paper maps, to real-time positioning and mobile networking. Once these elements are programmed into the ‘city’, it becomes an engineered promise of enmeshed and diversely experienced 'locals’. The knowledge of the city for better or for worse is augmented by this practice.

The assumptions built into geo-platforms, is that they can be represent anywhere and everywhere. This presumes that cities, the specific entities within them and the relations among these are interchangeable. Concurrently, geo-platforms are continuously being updated, functionality is added and often external actors build new apps and create services to extend them. This questions the initial assumption that one geo-platform fits all places and that places have no specificities. Meantime, there is the belief that a city’s specificities can be encapsulated in a tweak and/or a hack. The recognition of this tension around processes of abstraction and specificities, within and outside location-based frameworks and the geo/coding of places these allow, highlights the misplaced promise and the hope for the seamless alignment between programmed dreams, living in a and the augmented city.

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The semantic production of space: pervasive computing and the urban landscape

Abstract: This paper suggests that as pervasive computing technologies have gained purchase in urban space they have also become more implicitly blended with everyday life and more contingent on information that is inductively compiled from Internet-based data services. It is argued that existing theorizations of the technologically mediated production of urban must engage with the increasingly implicit nature of informational transactions as well as the emergent semantic structuring of information. Drawing on examples of ongoing pervasive computing projects, implicit computing procedures are explored in relation to the mediation of everyday urban life. Literatures from computing science and geographical theory are brought into conversation in order to examine the consequences of a convergence between implicit pervasive technologies and the spaces of everyday life.

The world’s most popular search engine, Google, has recently announced a fundamentally new way of representing populated place. With its ‘Knowledge Graph’, which is a ‘semantic network’ containing over 18 billion facts, the search engine is changing how geographic information is presented. Conducting a search for “capital city of Israel”, for example, currently results in the prominent display of facts about Jerusalem including a map with its borders, size, population numbers, weather and points of interest.

Google’s embrace of the Semantic Web was seen as a major success for the movement calling for the next moment in the Web’s history - a moment in which information is being increasingly tagged, standardised, and ordered in order to allow information to be more easily shared and reused. But this fairly innocuous-sounding movement has a single impact that many didn’t foresee. Categorization of cities is taking place outside of the control of those affected by those sites and is now in the hands of a technical elite.

This paper tracks data about two cities as they appear, congeal, morph and are transfigured by its movement through three of the world’s most important data platforms: Wikidata, Wikipedia and the Google Knowledge Graph. In doing so we ask three key questions: In whose interests are these snippets of data being decided? What are the material conditions that have led us to this point in the history of the web? And what does it mean for the future of cities and the voices that represent them?

As public space has been overlaid with invisible, electronic networks made up of wireless media and devices, myriad aspects of society have become enmeshed with and mediated through devices capable of computing – of calculating and processing data. The very ubiquity of code as a mediator in human’s lives has led to its disappearance from conscious consideration. This “invisible infrastructure” of hybrid spaces reshapes the experience and function of late capitalist modernity. While technology has long been associated with radical changes in culture, politics, and economics and the specific mobilities and dynamism offered by information networks has been widely acknowledged, less has been said on how mobile, digital, spatial technologies are shifting the social construction of space. While space remains socially constructed as Doreen Massey suggested, this research sheds light on whose social experience is encoded into software and comes to mediate lived experience. Drawing on qualitative interviews and observations of individual users of mobile, spatially-aware applications – such as Yelp, FourSquare, and others – this talk highlights the role code plays on the social construction and experience of space. Being placed on a map, and in a system of consumption, engenders feelings of confidence tailored to the desires of application designers and the needs of large corporations. While retaining ultimate agency over their location, end-users enmesh their digital ‘location’ within a system of data’s creation, commodification, and exchange.

As the Internet has matured, new technologies have blurred the line between data creator and consumer while decentralizing the creation of content. The term Volunteered Geographic Information was coined to describe the contribution of online geographic data by citizens (Goodchild 2007). The rapid increase of available online data including VGI has been labeled the exaflood. Even while the amount of data online is increasing, a 2013 Pew Research Center study found that 15% of U.S. adults do not use the Internet (Zickuhr 2013). The production of VGI is believed to fall along the gradient of skills, access, and technologies that form the digital divide We further believe that there is a geographic pattern to this digital divide on VGI and that the pattern can be mapped and predicted by the distribution of key variables. This paper will report on our examination of VGI/digital divide from two aspects - (1) how is the production of VGI related to data contributors, and (2) how does the digital divide of VGI illustrate itself spatially in the US? The objectives of this study are to evaluate a large VGI dataset using 'big data’ methods with the aim of understanding the uneven spatial distribution of VGI data. Using data extracted from OpenStreetMap, the paper will compare and map the top fifty 2010 Metropolitan Statistical Areas for OpenStreetMap activity from 2005-2013; it will relate county-level socioeconomic digital divide variables with OpenStreetMap activity to evaluate if there is a significant relationship between income, education, and OpenStreetMap activity.

The Internet is an increasingly important part of British social and economic life. Britain has the largest Internet economy in the industrial world, measured as a percent of GDP. Social life is increasingly mediated, influenced, and augmented by online interactions that take place through the Internet. Yet despite the importance of the Internet in everyday life, we know surprisingly little about the geography of Internet use and participation at sub-national scales.

The 2013 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), a random probability sample of 2,657 households in Great Britain, asks many questions about digital participation, interests, activities, and the types of content that people produce. However, the sample size of the survey is too small to make detailed inferences about the geographies of digital inequality below the regional level. By combining 2013 OxIS data with social and economic statistics from the 2011 census, and social media data from a database of Twitter, we can use small area estimation techniques to estimate Internet participation and other variables down to the county level for all of Great Britain. This allows us to map the geography of internet use at levels heretofore unknown. More theoretically, ask how we might expand some of the insights from OxIS using traditional (the census) and unconventional (social media data shadows of places) means. Ultimately this work leads us to ask what methods are appropriate to measure local-scale geographies of digital participation.

This study investigates the intersection of various kinds of media in the contexts of augmented realities at moments of stress. We specifically ask whether geosocial media reflect the same patterns that are produced through more traditional producers of media (i.e. newspapers). In doing so, we can better understand the diverse layers of content that augment our experiences in moments of conflict, stress, and unrest. To do this, we consider the response of the Web to a 2013 terrorist attack at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. We will conduct a quantitative analysis of two datasets: first, the “Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone” (GDELT), which is a collection of 250 million stories published in newspapers from almost every country on Earth; and second, a collection of geocoded tweets extracted from a set of 2 million collected over the course of a month.

In both databases, we identify locations and events which mention the attack, and analyse the geographic and temporal distribution of items in both datasets. Specifically, we compare engineering resilience (recovery times), raster-based distributions, and aggregations to larger spatial units. In doing so, seek to understand whether global and local attention (over time and over space) in the data shadows of this event differ substantially. Drawing on the literature on resilience and spatial perceptions, we then attempt to ask what the effects-in-the-world of these variable geographies and temporalities might be.

Geosocial media provides new ways to understanding places, particularly how they change over the course of a day as well as documenting connections between places. These insights, however, come with heightened privacy worries and concerns about the biases contained within the data shadow associated with each particular form of social media. In short, we know far too little about the representativeness of geosocial media data and are just beginning to grasp the implications on privacy associated with its use.

This paper seeks to fill this gap with an intensive study of one form of social media data, geotagged Tweets. Building on the DOLLY database, a repository at the University of Kentucky containing all geocoded tweets since December 2011, this paper quantifies the demographics of Twitter users. Using a dataset based on a random sample of 100,000 American Twitter users and the ~55 million tweets they sent in the last 16 months, we explore a number of techniques to establish home location of users, such as sustained presence and movement. Once home locations are identified we draw upon demographic data from the U.S. Census at the block group level to provide some insight on the nature of these users. While ever mindful of ecological fallacy, we explore the relationship between the density of inferred home locations and the demographics of that geography. This also allows us to go beyond a demography based on where people sleep and instead combine these demographic profiles with the intra-day movements of each user. In doing so, we document connections between locations and demonstrate how the demographic profile of any particular location changes over the course of a day.

The goals of this paper are 1) to outline a method for connecting geosocial media with official demographic data and 2) use geosocial media to better understand the demographic dynamism of locations in the course of day.

Most parts of our urban areas have become both digitally connected and represented by digitalized information. Digital layers of geographic information (commonly referred to as “augmented reality” by computer scientists) can take myriad forms. The most visible of which are probably the digital maps that many people use to navigate through cities. Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Apple, OpenStreetMap, Baidu, and many other companies and organisations all host publicly accessible platforms that partially reflect parts of our world. These services also become the platform for an almost unimaginable amount of additional content that both reflects the materiality of cities and augments it with additional content. This additional volunteered (and emitted) geographic information is comprised of photographs, blogs, tweets, social media checkins, webcams, videos, and encyclopedia articles. These layers of digital representations are then further reproduced and repurposed in the ways that they annotate the urban environment

The ambition of this session is to interrogate the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced digital information and the code through which it is regulated. By asking what these augmented realities are, where they are and where they are not, and how they are brought into being, we can both unpack the language we use to speak about digital augmentations and explore the ways in which digital extensions of place are becoming increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies.

This session seeks two kinds of papers. First it aims to provide space for papers that explore the ways in which we should imagine, describe, critique, and even name, the digital and informational augmentations of our lives. Second, the session seeks papers that critically examine information geographies and augmented realities in specific contexts. How do informational augmentations impact on how we bring our worlds into being? What and where do they exclude? What narratives and discourses do they allow, and what do they conceal? How are they governed, regulated, and challenged?

Please submit abstracts of less than 250 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) and Matthew Zook (zook@uky.edu) before October 31, 2013. We will review abstracts in order to form cohesive sessions.

I am the Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and a Research Affiliate at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment.